“Aye, your Majesty, it does.” Hajjaj’s mouth twisted; he liked that no better than did the king. “But our only other choice is to be shackled to Unkerlant, and King Mezentio’s chains are longer and looser than the ones King Swemmel would have us wear.”
“Curse it, we are Zuwayzin--free men!” Shazli burst out. “Our ancestors did not suffer themselves to be tied to other kingdoms. Why must we?”
That was the heroic version of Zuwayzi history. Hajjaj too had grown up hearing minstrels and bards sing of it... but, when he had grown up, Zuwayza was a province--a disaffected province, aye, but a province nonetheless--of Unkerlant. Later, he’d gone to an excellent university in Trapani and had got a different view of how and why things had gone as they had for his people.
“Your Majesty, our clan chiefs love freedom so well, even now they grudge bending the knee to you,” he said. “They would sooner fight among themselves than listen to anyone who tells them they must not. That, of course, is how Unkerlant was able to conquer us: when one clan’s holdings fell, the other chiefs did not join together against the foe but often laughed and cheered to see their neighbor and old enemy beaten.”
“I am not sure I see your point,” Shazli said.
“It is very simple, your Majesty,” the foreign minister said. “By trying to hold on to too much freedom, our ancestors lost all they had. They were so free, they ended up enslaved. We, now, have less freedom than we might like, but less freedom than we might like is better than no freedom at all.”
“Ah.” The king smiled. “You are at your most dangerous, I think, when you speak in paradoxes.”
“Am I?” Hajjaj shrugged. “We are still free enough to make choices about who our friends should be. Things could indeed be worse, as you say; we might have no choices left to call our own. And we have taken back all the land the Unkerlanters stole from us when they conveniently forgot about the Treaty of Bludenz--and more besides, to make the revenge sweeter still.”
“Aye, for the time being we are victorious.” Shazli stretched out a long, slim forefinger to point at his foreign minister. “But if you were so proud of our victories as all that, would you have tried to pull us out of the war?”
“Our victories depend on Algarve’s victory,” Hajjaj replied. “True, Algarve makes us a better ally than Unkerlant--we’re farther from Trapani than we are from Cottbus, after all. If I had a choice, though, I would sooner not be bound to a pack of murderers. That is why I tried to escape.”
Shazli’s laugh was bitter as the beans Zuwayzin sometimes chewed to stay awake. “We’ve picked the wrong war for principle, haven’t we? King Mezentio slaughters his neighbors; King Swemmel slaughters his own. Hardly a pretty choice facing us, is it?”
“No, and I rejoice that you understand as much, your Majesty,” Hajjaj said, respectfully inclining his head toward his sovereign. “Since principle is dead--since principle was murdered to power magecraft--all we can do is look out for ourselves. That we have done, as well as we are able.”
King Shazli nodded. “The kingdom is in your debt, your Excellency. Without your diplomacy, Unkerlant would still be occupying much that is ours--and would have taken more in the fighting.”
“You are gracious to me beyond my deserts,” Hajjaj said, modest as any sensible man would be at praise from his king.
‘And you, Hajjaj, you are one of the largest pillows lying beneath the monarchy,” Shazli said. “I know it, as my father knew it before me.”
Other Derlavaians would have spoken of pillars, not pillows. Hajjaj, far more cosmopolitan than most of his countrymen, understood as much. His years at the university in Algarve and his travels since sometimes made him look on Zuwayza’s customs as an outsider. He could see foibles other Zuwayzin took for granted. But so what? he thought. It wasn’t as if foreigners had no foibles of their own.
Shazli said, “We continue, then, and hope Algarve triumphs so that our own advances are not written on sand?”
An Algarvian or a man from the Kaunian kingdoms--likely an Unkerlanter, too--would have said written on water. But water, in Zuwayza, was scarce and precious, while the sun-blasted desert kingdom had an enormous superabundance of sand.
Hajjaj shook his head. He was woolgathering again. He did it more and more as he got older and hated it. Was it the first sign of drifting into senility? He dreaded that more than the physical aches and pains of old age. To be trapped inside a body that would not die, while he forgot himself one piece at a time . . . He shuddered. And he was woolgathering again, this time about woolgathering.
Vexed, he gave the answer that should have come sooner: “If the powers above were kind, we would watch from the north until the last Algarvian and the last Unkerlanter beat in each other’s heads with clubs.” His shrug was mournful. “Life is seldom so convenient as we would wish.”
“There, your Excellency, you touch on a great and mysterious truth, one that holds even for kings,” Shazli said. He got to his feet, a sign he had given Hajjaj all the time he intended to spare today.
Grunting, his knees clicking, the foreign minister also rose and bowed to the king. As kings went these days, Shazli was a good sort: not a sharp-tempered martinet like Mezentio, much less a tyrant fearful of his own shadow like Swemmel. But then, the clan chiefs of Zuwayza ceded fewer powers to their kings than did the Algarvian nobles, while the old Unkerlanter nobility, these days, was largely deceased, replaced by upstarts. Swemmel had so much power because no one around him had any.
After formal farewells that used up another quarter of an hour, Hajjaj made his way through the corridors of the palace to the foreign ministry. The building was as cool a place as any in Bishah: its thick walls of sun-dried brick could challenge even the Zuwayzi climate.
“Nothing new to report to you, your Excellency,” Hajjaj’s secretary Qutuz said when the foreign minister poked his head into his office.
“I thank you,” Hajjaj replied. He eyed Qutuz, a solid professional, with a wariness he hoped he kept covert. He’d trusted the man’s predecessor, who’d proved to be in the pay of Unkerlant. No matter how well his new secretary performed, Hajjaj knew he would be far slower in warming to him, if he ever did. He said, “So long as things are quiet, I think I shall knock off early for the afternoon. Would you be so good as to summon my driver?”
“Of course, your Excellency,” Qutuz said. Before long, Hajjaj’s carriage was rolling up a narrow, twisting road into the hills above Bishah. Houses perched here were young fortresses, dating back to the days when any clan’s hand was likely to be raised against its neighbor.
Hajjaj’s home was no exception to the rule. Back in the days before mages learned to liberate great blasts of sorcerous energy, it could have stood siege for months. Even now, his large household included gate guards; no telling when some local lord might try to settle a score that had simmered, unavenged but unforgotten, for half a dozen generations.
After the guards let the carriage roll through the entranceway, Hajjaj’s major-domo Tewfik came waddling up to meet him. “Hello there, young fellow,” Tewfik said, bowing to Hajjaj. He was the only man alive entitled to greet the foreign minister thus. He had been in the household longer than Hajjaj had been alive. Hajjaj thought he was about eighty-five, but he might have been older. As surely as Hajjaj ran Zuwayza’s foreign affairs, Tewfik ran Hajjaj s domestic ones.
Returning the majordomo’s bow, Hajjaj asked, “And how are things here?”